Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/130

108 general forms,—the larger number were communities for families, the smaller in number and lesser known were individualistic. Of the latter, Thoreau's experiment is the popular example. The wave of social agitation which overran America at this time was the natural sequence of the teachings of Lassalle and Fourier, of Southey, Coleridge and Godwin. The actual experiments of Robert Owen, on his proselyting visit from England twenty years before, had included a short-lived settlement in Indiana. The Fourierian Phalansteries in New Jersey and Pennsylvania were established under the guidance of William Channing and Horace Greeley. At about the same time was started the still existent Oneida Community.

As early as 1835 there had gathered in New England, with centre of interest at Boston, philosophers to discuss the idealism of Kant, Hegel and Schelling and its interpretations in the writings of English authors. To these abstract phases of discussion were joined, in America, zealous arguments on state, church and society. Here smouldered reactionary fires against both the Trinitarian and the Unitarian forms of Puritanism. Defiant to the Calvinistic dogma of man's inherited depravity, were doctrines of human goodness and progress, emphasis of the divinity in man and his relation to